The end of the machine that produces fear?

“There is very good reason to believe that, in a generation or so, capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet, and the current form of capitalism doesn’t seem to be capable of generating the kind of vast technological breakthroughs and mobilizations that would be required for us to start finding and colonizing any other planets. Yet faced with the prospect of capitalism actually ending, the most common reaction – even from those who call themselves “progressives” – is simply fear. We cling to what exists because we can no longer imagine an alternative that wouldn’t be even worse.

How did we get here? My own suspicion is that we are looking at the final effects of the militarization of American capitalism itself. In fact, it could well be said that the last 30 years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a giant machine designed, first and foremost, to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At its root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world – in response to the upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s – with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, flourish or propose alternatives; that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win. To do so requires creating a vast apparatus of armies, prisons, police; various forms of private security firms and police and military intelligence apparatus, and propaganda engines of every conceivable variety, most of which do not attack alternatives directly so much as create a pervasive climate of fear, jingoistic conformity and simple despair that renders any thought of changing the world, an idle fantasy.

Maintaining this apparatus seems more important to exponents of the “free market” than maintaining any sort of viable market economy. How else can one explain what happened in the former Soviet Union? One would ordinarily have imagined that the end of the Cold War would have led to the dismantling of the army and the KGB and rebuilding the factories, but in fact what happened was precisely the other way around. This is just an extreme example of what has been happening everywhere. Economically, the apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and no doubt it’s yet another element dragging the entire capitalist system down – along with producing the illusion of an endless capitalist future that laid the groundwork for the endless bubbles to begin with. Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.

In other words, there seems to have been a profound contradiction between the political imperative of establishing capitalism as the only possible way to manage anything, and capitalism’s own unacknowledged need to limit its future horizons lest speculation, predictably, go haywire. When speculation did go berserk, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”

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10 Comments →The end of the machine that produces fear?

“Finance capital became the buying and selling of chunks of that future, and economic freedom, for most of us, was reduced to the right to buy a small piece of one’s own permanent subordination.” and “When speculation did go berserk, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”

I like how this essay points to the ongoing use of fear to control people (including the advertising industry’s use of fear – of not being thin, pretty, etc enough – to get people to spend money trying to obtain some external “ideal”).

But the idea that “When speculation did go berserk, and the whole machine imploded, we were left in the strange situation of not being able to even imagine any other way that things might be arranged. About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.” suggests to me that the author didn’t do his research adequately enough.

There are a lot of people who ARE capable of imagining things being “arranged” (organized) differently, especially those of us who have studied the works of people such as Buckminster Fuller, W. Edwards Deming, and Russell L. Ackoff (all masters of the art/science of systems thinking). If you Google “steven brant capitalism is dead” you will find my essay from 2008 on The Huffington Post about what we can do (redesign our sociopolitical economic systems around abundance rather than scarcity principles). And if you go to my website, you will see a link to my interview on Fox Business News Live (yes, Fox) about “redesigning capitalism” too.

There are solutions out there. We CAN think differently. And those who fear the future need to keep looking… because hopeful solutions exist that are capable of getting us out of this crisis!

This premise “capitalism itself will no longer exist – most obviously, as ecologists keep reminding us, because it’s impossible to maintain an engine of perpetual growth forever on a finite planet,” is stated in error.

Shades of Malthus and Ricardo: “About the only thing we can imagine is catastrophe.”

Iceland chose not to accept “permanent subordination.” Capitalism in its essence has and will always be. Investing Time, Treasure and Talent to produce for exchange to others as a means of earning a livelihood.

I wouldn’t give capitalism much longer to live. It’s most likely going to die out within the next 100 years or so, hopefully in my lifetime (I’m 23 as of right now). However, the question we should all be asking is, if capitalism will inevitably collapse, what is to replace it? Will it be mutualism, anarcho-communism, a hybrid of the two, or state-socialism or fascism? That’s why I would argue we should be the ones creating the new system RIGHT NOW as the old system crashes so we can be sure that we (or our children or grandchildren) aren’t out of the frying pan and into the fire.

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Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens is the founder and president of the P2P Foundation and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. Bauwens travels extensively giving workshops and lectures on P2P and the Commons as emergent paradigms and the opportunities they present to move towards a post-capitalist world.
In the first semester of 2014, Bauwens was research director of the floksociety.org which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador, in order to create policies for a 'social knowledge economy'.
In January 2015 CommonsTransition.org was launched. Commons Transition builds on the work of the FLOK Society and features newly revised and updated, non-region specific versions of these policy documents. Commons Transition aims toward a society of the Commons that would enable a more egalitarian, just, and environmentally stable world. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, who have organised major global conferences on the commons and economics.